Hey everybody! If you didn’t hear the good news last night, a district judge in Riverside, CA ruled that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is unconstitutional. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time today to do my typical weighty analysis of the 85-page decision. Instead, let me give it to you in the most abridged format, with links to further analysis.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Zack Ford has the story: DADT Ruled Unconstitutional – A Quick Synopsis:
Amorality
Allow me to let you in on a little secret: I am 100% amoral. That's right: I do not have a shred of morality in my being. Not a jot, a tittle, a soupçon, or a wee dram. None, zero, zilch, nada.
Before you get alarmed you should ask me the very first question you should always ask a philosopher: what exactly do you mean by "morality"? And there's the rub. I do not do anything, ever, only because it is the right thing to do. I act only to maximize my own personal happiness and satisfaction.
As it happens, I have a brain: I can remember the past, predict the future, and imagine possibilities. I can rationally know that my own happiness and satisfaction is greater in a world where people tend to refrain from killing each other, beating each other up, or stealing their stuff. And since I live in a world where other people also have brains and imagination, and they know too they themselves will be happier if people don't go around killing each other. So we make promises to each other, and — more importantly — enforce those promises with police and prisons, judges and jails, soldiers and the occasional nuclear bomb. Because I know that if we all make and keep certain promises we will all be better off, I have a good reason for making and keeping these promises myself: I will be happier and more satisfied.
But that's not morality, at least not as some people construe morality. Morality means doing what's "right" without regard to your own or anyone else's benefit. In fact, we know that we are acting morally only if our actions benefit no one. It just doesn't matter, for example, that women are people, with their own wants and needs, and we would all be better off — women and men alike — if they had all the freedoms, responsibilities, and benefits afforded men. The right thing to do is for women to be submissive and subservient to men regardless of the cost to men and women alike.
This is the morality that people like Vox Dei correctly argue is unavailable to atheists. It is the morality of acid thrown in a woman's face, the morality of faggots tortured and strung up on fence to die, children left by their parents to die of appendicitis. It's the morality of genocide, slavery, tyranny and oppression. Yes, that's a morality that as an atheist I'm proud to say does not apply in the least to me: you can be damn sure that I'm completely amoral.
Before you get alarmed you should ask me the very first question you should always ask a philosopher: what exactly do you mean by "morality"? And there's the rub. I do not do anything, ever, only because it is the right thing to do. I act only to maximize my own personal happiness and satisfaction.
As it happens, I have a brain: I can remember the past, predict the future, and imagine possibilities. I can rationally know that my own happiness and satisfaction is greater in a world where people tend to refrain from killing each other, beating each other up, or stealing their stuff. And since I live in a world where other people also have brains and imagination, and they know too they themselves will be happier if people don't go around killing each other. So we make promises to each other, and — more importantly — enforce those promises with police and prisons, judges and jails, soldiers and the occasional nuclear bomb. Because I know that if we all make and keep certain promises we will all be better off, I have a good reason for making and keeping these promises myself: I will be happier and more satisfied.
But that's not morality, at least not as some people construe morality. Morality means doing what's "right" without regard to your own or anyone else's benefit. In fact, we know that we are acting morally only if our actions benefit no one. It just doesn't matter, for example, that women are people, with their own wants and needs, and we would all be better off — women and men alike — if they had all the freedoms, responsibilities, and benefits afforded men. The right thing to do is for women to be submissive and subservient to men regardless of the cost to men and women alike.
This is the morality that people like Vox Dei correctly argue is unavailable to atheists. It is the morality of acid thrown in a woman's face, the morality of faggots tortured and strung up on fence to die, children left by their parents to die of appendicitis. It's the morality of genocide, slavery, tyranny and oppression. Yes, that's a morality that as an atheist I'm proud to say does not apply in the least to me: you can be damn sure that I'm completely amoral.
A Journey
Peter Stothard reviews A Journey, Tony Blair's new memoir:
Tony Blair’s political memoir has been pulled apart this week as though it were the palace of a fallen dictator, not so much reviewed as ransacked. Reporters have raced through its 700 pages as though each were some hitherto shuttered room hiding unused ammunition, looted antiquities, piles of purposeless propaganda, racks of vintage wines and extravagant wardrobes. With no prior newspaper serialization deal, there was a stampede for stories that matched the frenzy for Saddam’s Picassos or Mrs Marcos’s shoes. The British may not like him much any more but the media remain fascinated by the man who led their government for a decade, led an unelectable party to three election victories, followed an unprecedentedly unpopular American President into even more unpopular wars and redefined the role of Prime Minister for an age in which the lines between the political and the personal were themselves being redefined.
Something and nothing
Why is there something rather than nothing?
This is, supposedly, the "big question" of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy. But it's a stupid question: at some point everyone, theist and atheist alike, has to say, something just is. Whether it's God or the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe, something just is. The "big question" is not: why is there something rather than nothing? but: what are the characteristics and properties of the something that just is?
In the 18th century, when the philosophies of deism and atheism began to take hold (especially with David Hume (1711 - 1776)) one proposed something-that-just-is was the whole natural universe, which (barring a few anomalies) appeared to be more-or-less stable and eternal. The whole universe (comprising at the time the solar system and the nearby stars visible to simple telescopes), complex as it was, was considered by atheists to be simpler than the alternative theistic something-that-just-is of an interventionist creator deity. But the whole universe is still extremely complex, especially when we include human beings and all of Earth's varied life forms. There was some appeal to the compromise position of deism: a deity has to get the complex universe started; the operation of non-teleological natural law is sufficient to explain and understand everything that happens afterward. The creator endows human beings with reason (and perhaps a moral sense), but after that it's up to us to work out what we do with it.
As we investigated these natural laws with increasing sophistication, we discovered quite a lot of the apparent complexity of the universe emerged from a much simpler basis. With the nebular hypothesis, the something-that-just-is no longer includes each planet in its particular orbit, but just a diffuse nebula. With the theory of evolution, the something-that-just-is no longer includes hippopotamuses, giraffes, gorillas and human beings, just the simplest possible life form. And with modern physics, cosmology, chemistry, etc. we got the natural story of the something-that-just-is down to the Standard Model of the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the Big Bang (with some quantum randomness thrown in to mix things up a bit).
It bears repeating: even if the simplest natural something-that-just-is were the present-day physical universe in all the complexity modern observational methods have revealed, that model would still be better than the deistic model and incomparably better than the theistic magical creator deity who not only magically pops the whole thing into existence but magically (but undetectably) dabbles and adjusts affairs from time to time and who has an obsessive concern with what we do with our genitals and requires his spokesmodels to wear silly hats. But the natural something-that-just-is isn't so complex as the whole physical universe; it's eight skitty zillion times less complicated. A handful of laws, a couple of dozen parameters, some mass-energy, a few microscopic irregularities in the initial distribution and Bang! the whole physical universe follows. If the whole thing is better than theism, this dramatically reduced version relegates theism to the outskirts of the peanut gallery.
Supposedly, Stephen Hawking's new book — which I haven't read yet, as it hasn't been released — simplifies the natural something-that-just-is even more. Even the Standard Model (somehow) emerges from just gravity. Some people wanted to believe that we needed a creator deity to fiddle with a score of dials to get this universe; Hawking now claims — as I understand it — if we want a creator deity, His only job is to push one button, a job for which the nervous system of a fruit fly is vastly overqualified.
The theistic story of something-that-just-is was made absurd in Ancient Greece, when we first realized that the physical world operated according to mechanical, non-teleological laws. Once we don't need a god to make the wind blow, to make the Nile flood every year, and to sustain the process of life from moment to moment, we don't need a god, period. The entire debate since then has been the retreat of the parasitical priests and prophets from their positions of power and privilege (hooray for alliteration!), a retreat where these bastards have extracted blood, death and suffering for every inch of ground they've lost.
But they have indeed lost.
This is, supposedly, the "big question" of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy. But it's a stupid question: at some point everyone, theist and atheist alike, has to say, something just is. Whether it's God or the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe, something just is. The "big question" is not: why is there something rather than nothing? but: what are the characteristics and properties of the something that just is?
In the 18th century, when the philosophies of deism and atheism began to take hold (especially with David Hume (1711 - 1776)) one proposed something-that-just-is was the whole natural universe, which (barring a few anomalies) appeared to be more-or-less stable and eternal. The whole universe (comprising at the time the solar system and the nearby stars visible to simple telescopes), complex as it was, was considered by atheists to be simpler than the alternative theistic something-that-just-is of an interventionist creator deity. But the whole universe is still extremely complex, especially when we include human beings and all of Earth's varied life forms. There was some appeal to the compromise position of deism: a deity has to get the complex universe started; the operation of non-teleological natural law is sufficient to explain and understand everything that happens afterward. The creator endows human beings with reason (and perhaps a moral sense), but after that it's up to us to work out what we do with it.
As we investigated these natural laws with increasing sophistication, we discovered quite a lot of the apparent complexity of the universe emerged from a much simpler basis. With the nebular hypothesis, the something-that-just-is no longer includes each planet in its particular orbit, but just a diffuse nebula. With the theory of evolution, the something-that-just-is no longer includes hippopotamuses, giraffes, gorillas and human beings, just the simplest possible life form. And with modern physics, cosmology, chemistry, etc. we got the natural story of the something-that-just-is down to the Standard Model of the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the Big Bang (with some quantum randomness thrown in to mix things up a bit).
It bears repeating: even if the simplest natural something-that-just-is were the present-day physical universe in all the complexity modern observational methods have revealed, that model would still be better than the deistic model and incomparably better than the theistic magical creator deity who not only magically pops the whole thing into existence but magically (but undetectably) dabbles and adjusts affairs from time to time and who has an obsessive concern with what we do with our genitals and requires his spokesmodels to wear silly hats. But the natural something-that-just-is isn't so complex as the whole physical universe; it's eight skitty zillion times less complicated. A handful of laws, a couple of dozen parameters, some mass-energy, a few microscopic irregularities in the initial distribution and Bang! the whole physical universe follows. If the whole thing is better than theism, this dramatically reduced version relegates theism to the outskirts of the peanut gallery.
Supposedly, Stephen Hawking's new book — which I haven't read yet, as it hasn't been released — simplifies the natural something-that-just-is even more. Even the Standard Model (somehow) emerges from just gravity. Some people wanted to believe that we needed a creator deity to fiddle with a score of dials to get this universe; Hawking now claims — as I understand it — if we want a creator deity, His only job is to push one button, a job for which the nervous system of a fruit fly is vastly overqualified.
The theistic story of something-that-just-is was made absurd in Ancient Greece, when we first realized that the physical world operated according to mechanical, non-teleological laws. Once we don't need a god to make the wind blow, to make the Nile flood every year, and to sustain the process of life from moment to moment, we don't need a god, period. The entire debate since then has been the retreat of the parasitical priests and prophets from their positions of power and privilege (hooray for alliteration!), a retreat where these bastards have extracted blood, death and suffering for every inch of ground they've lost.
But they have indeed lost.
The Stupid! It Burns! (selfish edition)
Debunking Atheism - A Continuation [fixed link] want unlimited license to perform whatever immoral act they wish at any time they wish with whomever they wish without any consequence. The existence of God automatically implies a Higher Authority to whom these people have to answer and which these people reject. While they falsely accuse Father Barron and like-minded individuals of selfishness and pride, it is actually they who are selfish and prideful. They elevate their own human reasoning processes to the pedestal of Godhead. They worship what they accomplish in their own minds rather than worshipping Him who created them. They reject any notion of a Higher Power because to them they ARE the Higher Power and no one is greater than they are.
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Politics and Utopianism
My political science textbook* has a great definition of Utopianism: utopianism is a disdain for specifically political processes. Utopianism goes all the way back to to Plato's Republic. While it's probably true that Plato didn't intend for the Republic to be a blueprint for an actual society, none of the institutions he describes as being part of an ideal** society are political. The rulers his society privileges — the "philosopher-kings" — are privileged because they embody the search for truth; there is no actual political process even within the philosopher class.
But what do I mean specifically by a political process? I think the key is that a political process is fundamentally a process of negotiation and compromise; it is not (except in a peripheral sense) fundamentally a truth-finding process. In contrast, while we can gain some information by counting noses, and scientists do engage in negotiation and compromise, scientific investigation really is fundamentally a truth-finding process; the political aspects are peripheral. Scientific theories are accepted as true fundamentally because of evidence, not because they are the theories that scientists like best.
The distinction between a negotiation and a truth-finding process is subtle and not entirely easy to discern. As noted, scientists do engage in negotiation and compromise regarding the conduct of science, and scientists make a lot of decisions — such as the decision of what hypotheses to investigate — purely subjectively. If you look closely, and you filter out all of the politics, something substantial remains in scientific investigation: a methodology that relies on evidence and the search for truth, truth that's independent of what the individual scientists like or want to be true.
Is there such an objective (or objective-seeming) methodology in capital-P Politics, i.e. the construction and maintenance of social institutions that guide our social and economic behavior? If there is, then Utopianism would be relatively benign (at least if we found an effective methodology). We could then consider the essential Utopian "disdain" for politics as just a filter to focus on the objective, truth-finding core.
But there isn't an objective methodology, or at least we haven't found one. Furthermore, we do know if there were an objective methodology, it must necessarily be essentially distinct from the scientific method. The scientific method works by noting that we do not in fact ever observe a violation of a true scientific principle; in other words, a true scientific principle is precisely some principle for which we never actually observe exceptions. Politics, however, is all about choices, and for some proposition to be an intuitively meaningful matter of choice, we must be able to actually observe exceptions. A law against murder, for example, is meaningful and relevant only to the extent that some people actually do choose to murder others.
One of the interesting themes prevalent in Utopian literature is not just the filtering out of politics (i.e. structure processes of negotiation and compromise), but the extirpation of politics. Plato's philosopher-kings do not negotiate, even amongst each other: they rationally search for the objective truth, truth that is independent of their particular personal preferences and interests. Indeed in most Utopian literature, society is simply assumed to be free of substantive conflicts of preferences and interest. Negotiation and compromise are, of course, tools for resolving substantive conflicts; without those conflicts the tools are irrelevant. Where no conflict exists, we observe no exceptions, and "correct" behavior at least seems a matter of objective truth.
So the key to identifying some element of literature is to look at how the author views politics, i.e. negotiation and compromise (as well as propaganda, the resolution of substantive conflicts by trying to directly alter others' preferences). If the author has a disdain for politics, if he or she "magically" waves away conflicts or posits that what appear as conflicts of preference and interest in reality are mistakes of fact and truth, then the work is Utopian.
It's important, I think, to distinguish between the disdain for politics from the promise of benefits. All Utopian authors will, of course, "sell" their Utopia with a set of promised benefits; no author will say their society is "right" even if it delivered no benefit at all. But the converse does not follow: a political theorist who promises benefits is not necessarily Utopian. Should we, for example, have at the beginning of the 18th century called capitalism a Utopian theory had we been prescient enough to see that capitalist democratic republics would have in reality created orders of magnitude more material wealth, for not just a few but for a billion; afforded the ability (by virtue of using that material wealth to support not just a privileged few but a veritable army of scientists and scientific technicians) to cure diseases that had for millennia caused untold suffering and death, to not only put a man on the moon but show that momentous occasion live to millions of people? I'm not saying that capitalism (and its political superstructure) has solved all of humanity's problems — far from it! — but the benefits it has actually delivered in just three short centuries would have seemed to the most intelligent, perspicacious thinker of 1701 to be so wildly implausible as to be worthy of the most severe "Utopian" derision.
We should always, I think, be extremely suspicious and skeptical of arguments from "human nature". If there is any truth about our meta-nature, it is that our actual nature in incredibly plastic. Human beings really can believe almost anything, sincerely, deeply and without a trace of irony.
But I think too there really are deep truths about human nature. One of those deep truths is that we really do have individual preferences and interests*, and there is no objective truth — statements that are true independently of our individual preferences and interests — about how we ought to live. We can figure out how to actually live only by the arduous and complicated process of continuous negotiation, compromise, propaganda, and the occasional (but hopefully minimal) bouts of coercion and outright violence.
The disdain and desire to extirpate politics is not just a description, it is a deep condemnation of Utopianism. A society without politics is simply not a society of human beings; if real human beings are there — human as we conceive ourselves today to be fully human — the politics will be there, somewhere, and the author is simply ignoring politics, not extirpating politics.
*Thomas M. Magstadt, Understanding Politics, ninth edition
**I mean "ideal" here in the sense of abstract, ignoring complicating factors.
**I mean "ideal" here in the sense of abstract, ignoring complicating factors.
But what do I mean specifically by a political process? I think the key is that a political process is fundamentally a process of negotiation and compromise; it is not (except in a peripheral sense) fundamentally a truth-finding process. In contrast, while we can gain some information by counting noses, and scientists do engage in negotiation and compromise, scientific investigation really is fundamentally a truth-finding process; the political aspects are peripheral. Scientific theories are accepted as true fundamentally because of evidence, not because they are the theories that scientists like best.
The distinction between a negotiation and a truth-finding process is subtle and not entirely easy to discern. As noted, scientists do engage in negotiation and compromise regarding the conduct of science, and scientists make a lot of decisions — such as the decision of what hypotheses to investigate — purely subjectively. If you look closely, and you filter out all of the politics, something substantial remains in scientific investigation: a methodology that relies on evidence and the search for truth, truth that's independent of what the individual scientists like or want to be true.
Is there such an objective (or objective-seeming) methodology in capital-P Politics, i.e. the construction and maintenance of social institutions that guide our social and economic behavior? If there is, then Utopianism would be relatively benign (at least if we found an effective methodology). We could then consider the essential Utopian "disdain" for politics as just a filter to focus on the objective, truth-finding core.
But there isn't an objective methodology, or at least we haven't found one. Furthermore, we do know if there were an objective methodology, it must necessarily be essentially distinct from the scientific method. The scientific method works by noting that we do not in fact ever observe a violation of a true scientific principle; in other words, a true scientific principle is precisely some principle for which we never actually observe exceptions. Politics, however, is all about choices, and for some proposition to be an intuitively meaningful matter of choice, we must be able to actually observe exceptions. A law against murder, for example, is meaningful and relevant only to the extent that some people actually do choose to murder others.
One of the interesting themes prevalent in Utopian literature is not just the filtering out of politics (i.e. structure processes of negotiation and compromise), but the extirpation of politics. Plato's philosopher-kings do not negotiate, even amongst each other: they rationally search for the objective truth, truth that is independent of their particular personal preferences and interests. Indeed in most Utopian literature, society is simply assumed to be free of substantive conflicts of preferences and interest. Negotiation and compromise are, of course, tools for resolving substantive conflicts; without those conflicts the tools are irrelevant. Where no conflict exists, we observe no exceptions, and "correct" behavior at least seems a matter of objective truth.
So the key to identifying some element of literature is to look at how the author views politics, i.e. negotiation and compromise (as well as propaganda, the resolution of substantive conflicts by trying to directly alter others' preferences). If the author has a disdain for politics, if he or she "magically" waves away conflicts or posits that what appear as conflicts of preference and interest in reality are mistakes of fact and truth, then the work is Utopian.
It's important, I think, to distinguish between the disdain for politics from the promise of benefits. All Utopian authors will, of course, "sell" their Utopia with a set of promised benefits; no author will say their society is "right" even if it delivered no benefit at all. But the converse does not follow: a political theorist who promises benefits is not necessarily Utopian. Should we, for example, have at the beginning of the 18th century called capitalism a Utopian theory had we been prescient enough to see that capitalist democratic republics would have in reality created orders of magnitude more material wealth, for not just a few but for a billion; afforded the ability (by virtue of using that material wealth to support not just a privileged few but a veritable army of scientists and scientific technicians) to cure diseases that had for millennia caused untold suffering and death, to not only put a man on the moon but show that momentous occasion live to millions of people? I'm not saying that capitalism (and its political superstructure) has solved all of humanity's problems — far from it! — but the benefits it has actually delivered in just three short centuries would have seemed to the most intelligent, perspicacious thinker of 1701 to be so wildly implausible as to be worthy of the most severe "Utopian" derision.
We should always, I think, be extremely suspicious and skeptical of arguments from "human nature". If there is any truth about our meta-nature, it is that our actual nature in incredibly plastic. Human beings really can believe almost anything, sincerely, deeply and without a trace of irony.
But I think too there really are deep truths about human nature. One of those deep truths is that we really do have individual preferences and interests*, and there is no objective truth — statements that are true independently of our individual preferences and interests — about how we ought to live. We can figure out how to actually live only by the arduous and complicated process of continuous negotiation, compromise, propaganda, and the occasional (but hopefully minimal) bouts of coercion and outright violence.
*It is, of course, possible that we will give rise to a successor without individual preferences. But I think most people would have a deep intuition that such a successor would not be fully human in an important sense. Whether or not such a successor arises, their problems will be their own. We have the problems of today to solve, problems that should embrace our present deep nature as individuals with individual preferences and interests.
The disdain and desire to extirpate politics is not just a description, it is a deep condemnation of Utopianism. A society without politics is simply not a society of human beings; if real human beings are there — human as we conceive ourselves today to be fully human — the politics will be there, somewhere, and the author is simply ignoring politics, not extirpating politics.
The Stupid! It Burns! (San Francisco edition)
If atheists are wiser, why are there so many of them who..? Are drug and Alcohol addicts
Live personal lives full of misery(cheating, robbing, lying)
In cities with a high concentration of them they have the highest rates of std’s such as syphilis and aids... that I have posted if you cant deduce this by common sense
try going into the CDC and looking or try a simple goggle search
“2002 San Francisco #1 again in syphilis cases ”
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Slave food
Savage Love (September 9, 2010):
My mistress wants to deny me the pleasure of regular food. We want to create a "slop" that I can eat four to five times daily that is highly nutritious but as bland-tasting as possible. Any ideas? Can you consult a nutritionist?
Seeking Slave Food
Are there any vegan restaurants in your area?
Poe's Law
Poe's Law? (Not to be confused with Cole's Law*)
Atheism
Stephen Hawking’s Latest Book Converting Lot of Atheists Into Believers
Atheism
Here are just a few true statistics. None of the facts have been changed. Let these be a warning to you.
1. Atheists are the least likely people in America to pray to God.
2. Most atheist do not attend church.
Stephen Hawking’s Latest Book Converting Lot of Atheists Into Believers
The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking’s latest book co-authored with physicist Leonard Mlodinow, is turning a lot of atheists/agnostics into believers, finds KBNN. An Internet based survey conducted by Rbit Analytics, an affiliated body of KBNN, has found that the book has profoundly shaken the disbelief of atheists, and toppled a lot of atheists/agnostics into believing in the God hypothesis.
*sliced cabbage
Monday, September 06, 2010
The value of philosophy
Academic Standards in Philosophy of Religion:
(via Geoff Arnold)
So yes, I think the standards in philosophy of religion are generally as high as standards in other fields of analytic philosophy. The problem is that standards in analytic philosophy are lower than they should be.Just a smidge.
(via Geoff Arnold)
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